St. Petersburg Times

AUGUST 11-17, 1997

Promises Now, Reform Later

By Pavel Felgenhauer

Defense Dossier is a regular column written by Pavel Felgenhauer, Segodnya's defense and national security affairs analyst.

RECENTLY President Boris Yeltsin has stepped up the frequency of his public appeals to Russian servicemen to support military reform. Each time Yeltsin has promised the soldiers' lot will improve and with it the army's combat might. There will be cuts in personnel, but "not at the expense of fighting units," and all in all "the reform will radically improve the social status and well-being of the man in uniform."

Other government officials have supported Yeltsin with soothing statements of their own to reassure servicemen that cuts will be moderate - and improvements great. In an interview in the daily Segodnya the commander of the Russian navy, Admiral Felix Gromov, said, "The navy will keep its present structure, and there will be no global changes." He believes the navy will be reformed, its personnel cut "a bit," but its role and capabilities will expand, since "Russia has a problem guarding sea communications and its maritime economic zones." Admiral Gromov says the Russian navy will procure new oceangoing destroyers and new patrol gunboats to meet these challenges.

It is hard to understand what sea lanes Gromov is talking about. Most likely, his idle Moscow-based staff got too involved with strategic PC games and imagined that one day enemy U-boats would threaten essential trans-Atlantic chicken imports from the United States and Russia would starve if the navy didn't get new oceangoing destroyers.

Obviously, Russian admirals still aren't ready to face this unpleasant fact: Today there are no threats whatever to any vital Russian "sea communications" if Russia remains at peace with the West and Japan and all the seas are open to legitimate traffic. On the other hand, if Russia gets involved in military conflict with the West, several new destroyers will not change the balance and open the seas.

Outlaws in the Caucasus have no battleships, and the communications they threaten are not maritime. Today Russia is squandering money to prop up the semblance of a blue-water navy. But the only beneficiary here is the U.S. Navy, since it can lure Congress into spending billions more dollars to maintain and build up a "counterbalance" against a mostly nonexistent naval Russian threat.

Admiral Gromov may not know it yet, but the Russian navy - unlike its American counterpart - will get no new warships, and the ones it already has will continue to rot without proper maintenance. Yeltsin may sincerely want to create a "modern, compact, mobile, well-equipped, all-volunteer armed force," but there is no money to do it in the government's coffers and no real need or intention to do so. Despite all of Yeltsin's recent rhetoric - "I assure you that reform is directed toward the strong enhancement of the country's defense capacity" - the Russian government is not seriously planing to fight anyone to defend "sea communications" or to do anything else of the sort.

Yeltsin and his government of "young reformers" want the army out of the way until the Russian economy starts to grow. The Kremlin sees sustained economic growth as the Promised Land - when it is reached, all other problems will soon disappear. So, before prosperity comes 'round the corner, Yeltsin plans to pacify his disgruntled troops by settling some pay arrears and offering lots of assurances of military grandeur in the future.

Recent successful privatization auctions may have provided enough money to fulfill Yeltsin's main promise - to pay out wage arrears on the military's basic pay "until September 1." The pledge to "settle welfare benefits arrears by the end of the year" will be much harder to meet, but perhaps by then economic growth will already be at hand.

All other announced reforms have meant in effect a re-allocation of resources to maintain the strategic missile nuclear forces at the expense of other services. Obviously, this initiative was put forward by the new defense minister, Igor Sergeyev, who comes from the rocket forces. But Yeltsin and his "young reformers" also believe that without a credible nuclear deterrence the West will lose all interest in Russia, kick it out of the G-8 and cut financial assistance.

In a peculiar Freudian way, a weak and basically nonaggressive Russia still acts from time to time like a nuclear superpower bully, because it wants the West to take it seriously and return some respect and love so that the engagement - call it a partnership, or what have you - can continue.

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Johnson's Russia List

#1113

11 August 1997

djohnson@cdi.org